PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers
John Nagle
nagle at animats.com
Mon May 14 00:35:22 EDT 2007
Paul Rubin wrote:
> Neil Hodgson <nyamatongwe+thunder at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>>>Plenty of programming languages already support unicode identifiers,
>>>
>>>Could you name a few? Thanks.
>>
>> C#, Java, Ecmascript, Visual Basic.
>
>
> Java (and C#?) have mandatory declarations so homoglyphic identifiers aren't
> nearly as bad a problem. Ecmascript is a horrible bug-prone language and
> we want Python to move away from resembling it, not towards it. VB: well,
> same as Ecmascript, I guess.
That's the first substantive objection I've seen. In a language
without declarations, trouble is more likely. Consider the maintenance
programmer who sees a variable name and retypes it elsewhere, not realizing
the glyphs are different even though they look the same. In a language
with declarations, that generates a compile-time error. In Python, it
doesn't.
John Nagle
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